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Sequestration has left tens of thousands of federal workers dazed, angry and broke, Senior Correspondent Mike Causey says. So were they wrong, or are they wimps? Were you tapped by the furlough fairy's magic wand? If so, how come? If not, how did you escape?

No, it is not necessarily true that an agency with no furloughs was overfunded. It means that they cut in areas other than pay checks. It may or may not be true that aghencies with furloughs could have cut elsewhere. I know that the IRS did furloughs. The result is that tax collections and audits were cut buy 3 days per RO and RA. that hurts the deficit.

There are a couple of things that are starkly clear from this whole sequestration & furlough affair:
1. Congress and the President caused it because they have simply been spending more than they take in for decades
2. The President proposed this as a solution that was not supposed to be implemented to scare politicians into fixing the problem (which proves politicians are only scared about losing an election)
3. The Congress then ensured furloughs by tying the hands of agencies
4. Agencies went along with it and so are complicit in the furlough (no matter how hard it was for them, or so they said)
5. Not all agencies we cut equally nor were all able to make cuts without furlough and so not all agencies used furlough to save money
6. The government is still mismanaging our tax dollars
7. Government agencies have no incentive to use the least amount of money to acocmplish their objectives - if they give back money this year, their budget will be reduced next year (perhaps we need to fix that)

The FY13 sequester didn't become real until the last half of the FY. Many activities didn't budget for it. In FY14, activities can budget ahead better. Unfortunately, this is one of the few methods to reduce spending. Congress needs to begin review of all government activities and pare down in a sensible fashion.

Politicians are doing everything possible to cut costs without cutting into their revenue source, Military Industrial Complex (MIC). For example, Project on Govt Oversight (POGO.ORG) found that contracted services cost 2 to 5 times more than just hiring folks into the Govt. The Cost-Plus-Fixed-Fee contracts allow companies to pay their employees more than the standard rates if they can find a financial source; e.g. politicians and influential Govt employees in the money trail. The same goes for materials like computers and test equipment. The program office said we had to use a finished product no matter what the cost. Luckily the customer slipped us some discretionary funds ($100K) and we had a system in 1 year that cost $35K versus $200K from the preferred vendor. We use software tools to accelerate the development, but now we are getting pressure to turn the software support over to the contractors and let them hand code it in C or C++. They charge $250K to $300K per year for a programmer while we only cost $140K - $180K depending on seniority. We only have a staff of 4 while they want to bring in 20+ personnel. We probably do not have a money problem if the politicians did not have a stake in the money flow.